Review: Cloud Atlas is more than a worthwhile watch

Film: Cloud Atlas
Cast: Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, James D'Arcy, Zhou Xun, Keith David, DavidGyasi, Susan Sarandon, Hugh Grant
Director: Tom Tykwer, Andy Wachowski
Rating: ****1/2

The best kind of science fiction film is not necessarily the one which can take you on the most imaginative ride or offer the best-looking vistas, but that which manages to be thought-provoking and sometimes, like any great work of art, a heart-wrenching reflection on the human condition.

Cloud Atlas, an adaptation of David Mitchell’s book of the same name interweaves six stories which span from the mid 19th century to a grim post-apocalyptic era.

An ill lawyer and an evil doctor on a ship returning to the US from Polynesia, a prodigiously talented but poverty-stricken musician serving under a burnt-out composer writing to his male lover in the 1930s, a journalist investigating a nuclear project in the 1970s, an embattled editor who is unwittingly finds himself exiled into an old age home, a liberated clone who is fighting against a totalitarian government in the near future Korea and a tribesman meeting the remnant of an advanced civilisation in the war-torn distant future. What do all these characters have in common? Even though their paths don’t intersect, they have distant connections, though vager than those depicted in hyperlinked movies like Babel. For, the film hints that they are the same people, well; they are even played by the same cast of actors, all of whom do a commendable job.

Even though the viewer is pulled and flung from one world to the next, the flow of the story, action and the suspense is well-regulated. Life, its eternal recurrence, the good and evil in human nature, the vagaries of the cosmos – merely one canvas can seldom do justice of such lofty themes. But at 172 minutes, Cloud Atlas tries to get the job done.

Weaving, as he does so well in the Wachowskis’ Matrix trilogy, plays the antagonising forces through history. Embodying the age-old might-is-right mentality, he chews up the scenery from a slave herder to a female nurse (!) to a satanic Dr Hyde-esque vision that haunts the tormented tribesman Zachry, played by Hanks (who himself has an unsavoury past as the poisonous Dr Goose, an avaricious innkeeper and the loose cannon writer you lands editor Timothy Cavendish, played by the brilliant Broadbent, into trouble). Grant is also suitably slimey, essaying the roles of the head of the evil nuclear project, the unforgiving brother and the tattooed scavenger of the future. Berry is just about all right, mostly as the agent of good, sometimes completely hidden under prosthetics- as everyone else- when an extra in somebody else’s story. Whishaw playing the rakish but reflective musician Robert Frobisher, whose life takes a tragic turn in the film’s opening and and D'Arcy as his wistful scientist lover, lends great gravity to the film.

Part special effects extravaganza, part morality tale, the massively ambitious Cloud Atlas is more than a worthwhile watch.